The Sage of Aquarius: A Centennial Study of the Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ. Robert M. Price

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СКАЧАТЬ all the people were entranced,

      and would have worshiped Jesus as a God;

      but Jesus said, “I am your brother man

      just come to show the way to God;

      you shall not worship man; praise God, the Holy One.”

      Here is a fine specimen of the same rationalist ridicule of idolatry we find in the Second Isaiah (Isaiah 44:9-20). It is, of course, a rationalism that stops short of turning its guns on religion per se as a superstition. In short, it is the religious rationalism of the Deists and Natural Religionists which have influenced Levi Dowling at other points, too. That Enlightenment piety shows itself as well in the disdain for wasting money on religious mummery that could have been spent for the poor, even though this point clashes with the canonical gospels (Mark 14:3-9).

      Even miracles are not, as in traditional apologetics, signs pointing to the glory of Christ himself, but only to that to which Jesus himself points: “He was transfigured that the men of earth might see the possibilities of man” (129:14).

      The Method and the Messiah

      How did Jesus attain unto his exalted office as the revelation of divine humanity? It is important to know, for, in the nature of the case, the rest of us must do the same thing if we wish to gain the same goal.

      The greatest mystery of all times

      lies in the way that Christ lives in the heart.

      Christ cannot live in clammy dens

      of carnal things. The seven battles

      must be fought, the seven victories

      won before the carnal things,

      like fear, and self, emotions and

      desire, are put away. When this

      is done the Christ will take posses-

      sion of the soul; the work is done,

      and man and God are one. (59:10-12)

      These words remind us of a similar passage from another modern gospel, perhaps the greatest of them, Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ:

      Struggle between the flesh and the spirit, reconciliation and submission, and finally—the supreme purpose of the struggle—union with God: this was the ascent taken by Christ, the ascent which he invites us to take as well, following in his bloody tracks. This is the Supreme Duty of the man who struggles—to set out for the lofty peak which Christ, the first-born son of salvation, attained.⁶

      The Gospel speaks typically of the Christ potential in every person:

      And Jesus said,

      “I cannot show the king, unless

      you see with eyes of soul, because

      the kingdom of the king is in the soul.

      And every soul a kingdom is.

      There is a king for every man.

      This king is love, and when this love

      becomes the greatest power in life,

      it is the Christ; so Christ is king.

      And every one may have this Christ

      dwell in his soul, as Christ dwells in

      my soul.” (71:4-7.)

      “And when he rises to the plane

      of Christine consciousness, he knows

      that he himself is king, is love, is Christ,

      and so is son of God.” (71:16)

      The emphasis is off of Jesus Christ in this gospel and on the reader, since Jesus came to initiate humanity as a whole into Christhood. “Christ” means “the Anointed,” but in this work it has come to mean “the Anointing.” Anyone can receive it, and thus anyone can become the, or a, Christ.

      Jesus comes to bring the sav-

      iour of the world to men;

      Love is the saviour of the world.

      And all who put their trust in Christ,

      and follow Jesus as a pat-

      tern and a guide, have everlasting life. (79:16-17)

      Such occasional seeming demotions of Jesus from the focus of Christian worship means not to denigrate Jesus but rather to regain the focus on Jesus’ desire to pass the anointing on to us. “Christ is not a man. The Christ is universal love, and Love is king” (68:11).

      Again,

      “I am the lamp; Christ is the oil

      of life; the Holy Breath the fire.

      Behold the light! and he who fol-

      lows me shall not walk in the dark,

      but he shall have the light of life” (135:4).

      Jesus is the bearer of the anointing, and he bears it for others. He is rather like the candle flame in the Buddhist parable which seeks to illustrate reincarnation as the sequential lighting of each candle in a series by the flame of the one before it. “I am the candle of the Lord aflame to light the way” (72:31). Jesus can even speak of himself in terms suggesting he senses the presence of the Christ as a distinct entity within him, the “sin” of the old Nestorian Christology:

      “He who believes in me and in

      the Christ whom God has sent,

      may drink the cup of life, and from

      his inner parts shall streams of li-

      ving waters flow” (134:3).

      His disciple Martha already understood this, that Jesus was not identical with that which he modeled: “And Martha said, ‘Lord, I believe that you are come to manifest the Christ of God’” (148:19, rewriting John 11:27).

      The Aquarian Jesus is made to speak with the bitter wisdom of twentieth-century hindsight when he predicts what will happen in his name because people will have misunderstood his role as central, not as instrumental: “because of me, the earth will be baptized in human blood” (113:14b; cf. Luke 12:49). But perhaps it is not the fault of poor mankind. Perhaps it must recoil from the revelation: “Behold, the light may be so bright that men cannot see anything” (107:18).

      The Aquarian Christology might be Pantheistic, given all these statements, but does it go far enough for us to be able to classify it under the rubric of New Thought? Indeed it does. We do find occasional boasts that, being one with Divine Reason and realizing it, one СКАЧАТЬ